The present invention relates to a floppy disk drive device or a disk drive, particularly to a disk drive for driving a FD (Floppy Disk) having a recording medium of a high memory density or a high memory capacity.
In the prior art, a conventional floppy disk drive is used for magnetically writing and reading information to/from a floppy disk. Such a disk drive comprises a casing or housing having a bottom plate and a front opening and defining an inner room or a floppy disk containing space. The floppy disk is loaded and unloaded into the inner room through the front opening. The information is magnetically written/read to/from the floppy disk by a magnetic writing/reading assembly and a drive unit both disposed in the inner room.
A conventional floppy disk comprises an outer container having a shuttered window and the magnetic recording medium contained therein. For reading/writing information to the floppy disk, the magnetic recording medium is partially exposed in the shuttered window of the outer container by opening the shutter and is brought into contact with a magnetic head of the magnetic writing/reading assembly.
In order to avoid unfortunate invasion of dust into the outer container through the opened window of the outer container to contaminate the magnetic recording medium, the floppy disk is provided with a liner and a lifter disposed in the outer container. The liner is pressed onto a surface of the magnetic recording medium by the lifter to prevent dust from contaminate the surface of the magnetic recording medium.
Recently, a new floppy disk has been proposed and become used which has a magnetic recording medium having a memory capacity higher than the conventional floppy disk.
The magnetic recording medium of the conventional or ordinary floppy disk usually has a conventional or ordinary memory capacity of 1-2 Mega bytes and that of the new floppy disk has a memory capacity, of about 128 Mega bytes or more, higher than the ordinary memory capacity. The floppy disk having the ordinary memory capacity and that having the higher memory capacity will be referred to as a ordinary floppy disk and a high capacity floppy disk, respectively, hereinafter.
The high capacity floppy disk is driven at a rotation speed higher than the ordinary floppy disk for magnetically writing and reading information. Therefore, with the high capacity floppy disk, it is desired not to use the lifter that's used in the case of the ordinary floppy disk. This is because the use of the lifter requires the increased torque for a driving motor of drive unit which drives the high capacity floppy disk at the high speed.
In addition, if dust or small rubbish invades into the outer container, it is difficult to remove and is readily adhered the surface of the magnetic medium and therefore the magnetic head, resulting in a problem where it is difficult to write and read information to/from the high capacity floppy disk.